Summer 2025 · Bath & West Showground, Shepton Mallet
Picture a field in Somerset in August. Fourteen thousand people, several thousand tents, and the particular English optimism required to pitch canvas in a country where the forecast is a rumour. There is a queue for the showers. There is a child, not yours, wailing somewhere near your groundsheet at half past five in the morning. And there is an enormous tent — the Big Top — where in a few hours a barrister, a bin man, a bishop and a bewildered teenager will stand shoulder to shoulder, singing the same words, none of them entirely sure how they ended up crying.
That is New Wine, and I have been thinking about why it works.
A field is not a sanctuary, which is rather the point
New Wine has gathered every summer since 1989; there are six days of worship, teaching, prayer and ministry for around 14,000 people. It grew out of the charismatic renewal within the Church of England, though the field these days holds Baptists, Pentecostals, independents and a fair number of people who would struggle to name their own tradition if pressed. Its own description of itself is the phrase I keep turning over: a movement of local churches, “gloriously ordinary,” Spirit-filled, sent out into every community.
And it is hard, in a way that a hotel conference is not. You are damp. You are tired. Your children have discovered mud. Nothing about the accommodation flatters anybody, which turns out to be precisely the mechanism. The consultant surgeon and the man who cleans the school hall are queuing for the same lukewarm shower, and neither of them looks remotely impressive doing it.
Turner, and the field between
Here is the idea that unlocked this for me, and it comes from an unlikely source: an anthropologist who spent his life studying tribal rituals.
Victor Turner noticed that societies everywhere build the same three-part structure into their most important ceremonies. First, you are separated — pulled out of ordinary life. Then you enter what he called the liminal state, the threshold, the in-between: the pilgrimage road, the wilderness, the field in Somerset. Here, the usual rankings dissolve. Nobody’s job title survives a camping chair. And in that stripped-down state, Turner observed something he named communitas — an intense, level, almost unbearable fellow-feeling among people who, back in the world, would never have spoken.
Then, crucially, you are sent home. The ritual is not complete until you return, changed, to the ordinary life you left.
Read New Wine’s own account of itself, and it is Turner’s structure exactly, arrived at independently and for entirely different reasons. They gather, seeking the Spirit’s power and presence together, and are then sent — their word — back to the parish, the school gate, the office, for the other fifty-one weeks. The field is not the destination. The field is the threshold you cross to be handed back to your own front door as somebody slightly different.
What the week actually holds
The teaching in the Big Top is substantial, not sentimental, and around it runs a programme of seminars that treats the whole of a life as fair theological territory: mental health, parenting, work, suffering, money and generosity. That last pairing matters to me more than most, and I’ll tell you why.
I spend my working life talking about money, and I have watched what it does to people who mistake it for the point. Handled honestly, money is a tool. It buys time, safety, options, and the ability to be generous without wincing. Handled badly, it becomes a small tyrant that eats every quiet hour you own. It is why I have always insisted that what you spend it on matters more than how much you accumulate, and why I am so glad a Christian festival treats stewardship as a serious question rather than an embarrassing one. Nobody’s soul was ever improved by pretending money is not there.
Alongside all this, the children have their own programme, the teenagers have theirs, and the young adults have theirs. Which means — and any parent will feel the force of this — you can receive something deep, at the same hour that your children are receiving something deep, and nobody spends the week in a corridor.
Can I be honest with you?
I have been suspicious of festival highs. There was a summer, years ago, when I came home from a week like this absolutely alight — certain, buoyant, closer to God than I had ever been — and then, somewhere around the following Tuesday, standing at the kitchen sink, it drained away entirely. I felt like a fraud. I concluded, quietly and for a long time, that the feeling had been the faith, and that its absence meant its absence.
It took me an embarrassing number of years to understand I had it precisely backwards. The tears in the Big Top were never the point. They were the door, not the room. What the week actually gives you is not a permanent emotional altitude but a set of habits, a handful of people who know you, and a memory of having been undone in public and survived it. The Tuesday sink is where faith actually lives. The field reminds you what you’re standing on.
How I read it
So I have made my peace with the mud. There is something in us that, occasionally, is taken out of our ordinary competence and set down in a field where nobody is impressed by us — where we queue, and sing badly, and are prayed for by a stranger.
If you have never been and you are curious, I’d only say that the discomfort is not incidental to it. Go expecting the weather to be against you and your dignity to take a modest beating. Then go home on Saturday, to the washing and the emails, and see whether anything has shifted. That is where you’ll find your answer — not in the tent.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a reflection, not spiritual direction. Where you go next is between you and God.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
© 2026 TheJacquelineBrand. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish without written permission.
